To the Sea
by Flame Tigress
Summary: Is there a plot? To tell the truth, not really, but there are loads of Frodo-angst; a bridge at night; rain; "Isn't anyone trying to find me? Won't somebody come take me home?"; and what might lead to Frodo's final decision to leave Middle-earth.


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Disclaimer: I wonder, sometimes, why I put a disclaimer on all my fics. Then I remember – because it's so fun to make jokes about why I put a disclaimer on all my fics! _Lord of the Rings_ was still written by J.R.R. Tolkien, which means characters, places, and the lyrics to Legolas' sea song belong to the aforesaid. But I'll let you know if anyone starts thinking it was really Sir Francis Bacon. Not a songfic, but I'll give some inspiration/idea credit to Avril Lavigne and songwriting co. for the lyrics to "I'm With You."

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Author's Note: I think I've moved beyond the songfic stage in my fanfiction-writing career, but I thought that someone so inclined could write an interesting Frodo-angst/romance songfic based on Avril Lavigne's "I'm With You." However, I don't write Frodo romance – just angst (and copious quantities of it!). But, of course, I had the idea, so I can't just sit around waiting for someone else to come up with it. That is how this thing evolved. No romance, but loads of angst, a bridge at night, rain, and "Isn't anyone trying to find me? Won't somebody come take me home?" (and somebody stop me before I start singing all of the lyrics).

Is there a bridge at the Hobbiton mill? Of course! Why, you ask (you who have actually given the layout of Hobbiton any thought)? Because my vignette bunny needs one and I say there is.

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Important Note: This is a sequel to my fic "Drowning Alone." If you haven't read that, read it first, or some of this won't make much sense. But don't think of needing to read that as a chore! It has won critical acclaim (as much as any fic can on FF.net), so read it and enjoy its angstiness!

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To the Sea

Night, October 5, 1420, the bridge at the Hobbiton mill.

There are two things in the world of which I am most afraid and always have been, and both of them are before me.

I _came_ here to be alone. I _came_ to think, to grieve in solitary suffering, with no one to comfort me or to lift me up if I should fall.

But still I am afraid. This bridge where I have walked so many times on ordinary business when the sun was shining looks alien and threatening in the dark and the rain, and I want a familiar voice or face, something to cling to. I want Sam to come and find me; and almost wonder why he isn't here already. He followed me once, when I was about to jump off a bridge of uncertainty into deep, dark, fast-moving water. We jumped off together.

But why should he come? He is asleep back at Bag End. My welfare is no longer his sole concern; he has Rosie to think of, and the new life she carries in her. It's selfish of me to think that he still listens for my every stirring as I sleep, that he even knows I'm gone.

Yet still I selfishly strain my ears against the soughing and murmuring of the rain and the running water for his anxious footsteps, his call of "Coming, Mr. Frodo! Coming!"

Nothing. All the rustling noises of rain and river sound eerily like silence. Familiar faces are asleep in the houses all around me; Sam could run here and find me in only five minutes; and yet I am alone, all alone, and it frightens me.

I shiver and pull my cloak more tightly about me. It's a cold night, and the rain is soaking through to my skin. But it is only early October; surely it cannot be as cold as I feel. I shudder violently as a chill seizes my left arm; I clutch at it with my right hand, trying to warm it, but the chill is too deep. Much too deep.

_What must it have been like for my parents to drown?_ I wonder. Like being dragged under, trying to fight but unable to, everything around them fighting against them, in the end their very bodies fighting against them as the strength to fight left them and with it the will. Like trying to refuse to do something as natural as breathing while everything in them but their hearts screamed at them to breathe. Was it a relief to finally give in, still wanting somewhere deep inside, but no longer strong enough, to fight? Did it feel natural, even pleasant after the first moment of excruciating pain, to give up, breathe in the water, and die even as their souls screamed out against it?

That, all of that, I fear above all else.

My parents were not alone when they drowned, and yet no one was there to pull them up when they fell. They were as alone as they ever could have been, as alone as they would have been had I not been standing on the bank, watching in helpless confusion and fear and horror. And then they left me alone, and I wonder if I have not been alone ever since.

But I am not alone. There is someone else here, just a shadowy shape, backlit by distant-seeming street lamps, amidst the rain and the darkness. A woman's voice sings a song so melancholy it seems to contain all the pain and heartache in the world, even mine. There is only one in the great whole of existence who could sing so. "Nienna*!" I cry out, as Aragorn called out "Tinúviel!" when he knew the beautiful maiden dancing and singing her sweet nightingale tune among the hemlocks. I want to rage at Nienna for singing my life in her mournful song, for pitying me with her never-ceasing tears. Her hair and clothing blow desolately about her in the softly sighting wind, battered by the swelling rainfall. She only once turns to glance at me, then goes on singing. I feel an utter fool. Of course no Valië is singing my song on this bridge; it's just a hobbit-maid with a life and a tale of her own. Perhaps Nienna sings a song for her as well.

I shiver again as the wind drives the chill of the rain deeper into me. Something about the cold and the wind seems to hollow me out, make me feel strangely empty. "I don't want to be all alone," I call to the woman who is not Nienna, more quietly than I cried out the name that was not hers; I'm not sure what I thought to accomplish, or why I thought she would care. She didn't even hear me, so it doesn't matter. I am alone.

I shove my hands in my pockets, trying to warm them, particularly my left. Something hard and metallic strikes my right thumb – a coin that I never bothered to take out of my pocket. I pull it out now and twirl it around in my fingers before absently tossing it into the stream below, like a child making a wish on a penny in a fountain. I watch the coin's slow, twisting, gleaming arc through the blurring of the raindrops, then lose the little silver glimmer in the rain-churned current below. I hope that throwing the coin in the river has no deeper meaning, I think ironically, and laugh aloud, a sharp, disharmonious sound that causes 'Nienna' to turn her head, puzzled at the sudden, unexplained interruption of the silence (or of the steady ambient sounds of water and song that have come to sound like silence), but keep on singing as if she had not heard. But when I think about it, of course the coin has a deeper meaning. I just didn't _want_ to think about it.

I thought, once, that casting the Ring into the fires of Orodruin would be like tossing a coin in a fountain, quick and mindless. When I left Bag End, I thought that when I got to the Crack of Doom, I'd just fish It out of my pocket and chuck it in and turn to Sam and say, "That's it, then – let's go home." I didn't think that _I _would become the tiny object battered and lost in a swift river.

No, I wish the coin had no deeper meaning – that it was just an absentminded fidget – but it was inevitable, wasn't it, that it had. Everything has, and I _have_ to think about it. Probably because I've gone completely mad. Even this calm, familiar river reminds me of my journey, of my pains – of the Ring – as I stand here thinking about drowning in it, battered by the rain from above, inexorably pulled down by the current from below, betrayed by my body's weakness from within.

I suddenly feel a driving need to go somewhere, anywhere, that does not make me think of the Quest. But where? Where could I go? I have traveled the breadth of Middle-earth, and all of it with that drag anchor of gold weighting my being, trying to fell me as I walked, like a glittering shackle chained around my neck. Should I journey the length as well, every mountain would be Caradhras, every mountain pass Cirith Ungol; every hill Amon Sûl, every rock maze the Emyn Muil; every river the Anduin, every waterfall Rauros; every wood the Old Forest, every swampland the Dead Marshes, every desert Gorgoroth. Where, where would not bring me these memories so bound to darkness? Nienna's song is mocking me once more, for her song, my song, the song of all the world, is a lament; there is nowhere on this earth where there is no pain, nowhere where I cannot find reminders of _my_ pain.

The strains of her melancholy, bittersweet tune sound familiar, and I listen through the rainfall's murmuring counterpoint to hear the words that tune I have heard once calls to mind: _To the Sea, to the Sea…_

There alone I have not gone, where _the white gulls are crying, _weeping like Nienna herself for all the tears that wash to fill the Great Water with bitter salt, rejoicing for the open blue ocean and sky. There, I have no memories of pain and world-weariness and shadow and fire and It.

The West Road through the Tower Hills leads to the Sea.

So does the river.

My thoughts have gone round in a circle, and I am back to thinking of what it would be like to end my life in this river. But I know what it would feel like. I have felt it before.

Memory washes over me: _My limbs are weak and heavy, as if I am trying to push through water. I feel like I am running out of oxygen, as though every breath leaves my lungs more and more starving for it. Each step is a battle, each mile a war as the dense air around me saps my strength, trying to labor through it, to reach someplace where I can gasp for breath…I am weary of this struggle; I've even forgotten what I was fighting for. When for so long, my fight has been merely to breathe, why should I not, as I have earned, end my struggle and breathe? And I put on the Ring and breathe, and like water, the fire rushes in to fill my lungs; and as if it is water that I inhale, I am numb to all pain, and cannot breathe but will never again need to…_

What terrifies me most of all is that despite my long-lasting phobia, when I drowned, I was not afraid.

But I am afraid now. I am afraid of drowning again, of being so weary I no longer want to fight to _live._ I am afraid of no longer being afraid to die.

'Nienna' is gone; I can no longer hear her plaintive song woven over and underneath the rain. Perhaps I have been crying while immersed in my thoughts, but I cannot really tell; I could not hear myself above the current and the downpour, and my face was already wet with rain. Oh, Varda, I want to stop fighting. Oh, Eru, I want to give in.

"Oh, Sam, I want to breathe," I whisper miserably, and then his arms are around me – I did not even hear his footsteps over the sorrowful sighing of the rain – and he murmurs soothingly, "I know." I can hear in his voice that he has no idea what I'm talking about; he is only trying to comfort me. And I'm impossibly glad of that. I don't want to explain. I just want him to comfort me. I huddle shivering in Sam's embrace, wrapping my right arm tightly around my bone-chilled left shoulder. I am too tired from struggling leaden-limbed against the water in my brain to cry.

"I want to breathe, Sam," I repeat wearily, but my heart is not in it.

"It's all right, Mr. Frodo. I'm here," he says warmly, steadily, so steadfast and strong and dependable that I wonder that I ever thought I was alone.

"I want to go home," I say simply, my voice small and childlike.

"Then I'll take you home," he promises, so earnest in his desire to reassure me that I want to believe he _can_ take me home.

I pause, trying to believe; then, exhausted and dejected and resigned, but not bitter – and least of all toward Sam – I state plainly, "I can't go home again."

"Shhhhh," Sam whispers, muffled in my hair, his breath warm and calming against my scalp. "You'll be all right."

No, I don't think I will be. Not tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that, or the next month…and Sam knows it, too. But I'm all right just now. I can follow Sam home and sleep in my own bed and it will be home for tonight. It will be the Shire, and Bag End, and where Sam is, and that will be enough.

And after that…I'll deal with it after that. Cross that bridge when I come to it, so to speak. But I gave up and breathed once before…I'm not going to do it again. I think my parents would be disappointed in me.

Sam and I walk back home, his arm around my shoulders, the pressure of his touch on my left arm a bit painful but much warmer than my own attempts to stave off the chill. The song I thought I heard Nienna singing – the song I now remember Legolas singing once – is running through my head: _To the Sea, to the Sea! The white gulls are crying…_

The West Road through the Tower Hills leads to the Sea.

* I should have warned you about the _Silmarillion_ reference. For those of you who don't know, Nienna is one of the Valar (gods), or more specifically, the Valier (goddesses) of Middle-earth. She lives in Valinor, in "the halls west of West," and sings the song of the whole world. But early on, her song became a lament because the world is full of grief, and so now she weeps and sings the lament of the whole world, and those (e.g., Olórin/Gandalf) who listen to her song of grief and pain learn pity and eventually wisdom. And no, this person is not really Nienna. If you don't get the Aragorn calling out "Tinúviel!" thing, it's in Appendix A of _The Return of the King _in the story of Aragorn and Arwen.

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Author's Note The Second: And, as everyone knows, _I_ wrote the tune to Legolas' sea song…and that's why I put in a reference to it, really.


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